Sunday, March 31, 2024 at 6:59 PM
Video Mads Pedersen opened the final of the Tour of Flanders very early and showed off his strength in the preliminary final. Lidl-Trek’s Danish favorite had to pay for this in the final, leaving him stranded almost three minutes behind the eventual winner Mathieu van der Poel.
Pedersen rode ahead for a while in the preliminary final with Van der Poel’s teammate Gianni Vermeersch. They never got more than half a minute from the chasing favorites group. “I hoped the gap would be bigger, so I could take it a little easier on the climbs. Then I could ride more at a comfortable pace,” Pedersen explained in conversation with, among others CyclingFlits.
“Unfortunately, that plan did not work out as hoped. Sometimes it works out well and sometimes it doesn’t. In retrospect I should perhaps have approached it differently, but there certainly would not have been a top result today,” the Dane is realistic.
Paris-Roubaix
After his heavy crash in Dwars door Vlaanderen, he is happy that he could participate in the Tour. For now, Pedersen sets his sights on Paris-Roubaix. “Hopefully I can ride a nice race next week,” he says. “I have seven days to recover and prepare. We believe that I can be 100% in seven days.”
Daan Hoole, Pedersen’s teammate at Lidl-Trek, also had a tough final. “The Koppenberg was really nothing at all. We had to walk up, and even that was almost impossible. You almost slipped, but you don’t do anything about it. I really had to get off, because I had no grip,” he reflects.